Feel the Horror: The Goosebumps Movie Has a Director, Is Actually Happening

“I’m so glad my childhood is being honored with a Goosebumps movie,” said no one ever.

OK, OK, so that might have been a bit bitter of me. Unreasonably so, because in the great R.L. Stine canon I was never even really into Goosebumps. I was more a Fear Street kind of girl. But, though it may be difficult for me to remember at times, Sony Pictures’ Goosebumps movie is not for people who grew up with Goosebumps. It’s for the kids of today. And can we really begrudge the kids of today their own version of evil ventriloquist dummies and monster blood-eating hamsters?

I can, but that’s only because I don’t like kids. Moving on… Meet Rob Letterman, your new Goosebumps director.

Sony’s had the rights to a Goosebumps movie for years, and the last time it popped up in the news was all the way back in January 2012, when Darren Lemke (Shrek Forever After, Jack the Giant Slayer) was hired to write the screenplay. (We don’t yet know which book, or books, he’s using.) And now Letterman, who has on his résumé Shark Tale, Monsters vs Aliens, and the live-action Jack Black version of Gulliver’s Travels, is in talks to direct.

Did anyone else just wince? Granted, I’ve heard good things about Monsters vs Aliens. But the writer of Jack the Giant Slayer and the director of Gulliver’s Travels doing a movie together? That does not fill me with hope.

But whatever. Maybe it’ll be a campy masterpiece. The original books weren’t exactly high quality children’s literature in the first place. There, I said it.